


the hopelessness of spilled blood

by alternatedoom



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - The Villains Won, Anal Fingering, Anduin is deeply depressed, Angst, Bad Ending, Battle, Biting, Bloodplay, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Fake Science, Hallucinations, Implied Cannibalism, Insanity, M/M, Oral Sex, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rimming, San'layn, Sexual Sadism, Suicide, The Scourge knows to focus the heals, Torture, Vampirism, Warcraft Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-16 05:36:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5816227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alternatedoom/pseuds/alternatedoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The King of Stormwind has one final chance to stop the Lich King.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. -1-

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Written for the World of Warcraft kink meme. The prompt was "Blood Princes x Anduin. Blame tumblr for this one. So yeah. Keleseth, Valanar and Taldaram... and Anduin. PLEASE, I NEED THIS LIKE I NEED AIR."  
> 2\. This story is a dark AU with a long setup, a serious mess of angst, and way more straight-up exposition than reads well. Rarely have I been this dismayed by something I've written, tbh. If you would like to skip directly to the part with the Blood Princes and the porn, I put that in a separate chapter, and that is what I'm kinda recommending unless you really like angst and don't mind a slow and exposition-heavy build.

The wedding was modest, appropriate for a time of war and a union in which his future wife was little known to him, of noble station but otherwise selected nearly at random. But he chose well, or luckily, for she was both intelligent and kind. And if she did not fulfill all his most secret desires, he found comfort in her arms and in her sweet nighttime embraces nonetheless. Anduin waited two years after his father was confirmed dead to marry. His remaining advisers encouraged it, and the wedding did have the effect of reassuring a frightened populace that life would go on; the marriage successfully sent the message that Stormwind and its monarchy and its citizenry would endure.

He led his people for two more years after that before he set out for Icecrown Citadel himself, long enough to see Broll and Veleera go, and Admiral Taylor and Grand Admiral Jes-Tereth. Lord Shadowbreaker and High Priestess Laurena, Bromos Grummner, and Duthorian Rall. General Jonathan and General Clay after him. Rhonin, Jaina, and Vereesa Windrunner managed to stop the life-extinguishing plague the Lich King's minions created but contained and destroyed it at the cost of their own lives. High Sorceror Andromath went, Generals Cloudwing and Mattingly, and so many more. The same vanishing of the populace, Anduin knew, had happened with the other races, the other cities, Horde and Alliance alike. Over the years, over and over, Azeroth hurled its finest remaining champions at the Lich King, only to see them fall again and again. Everyone he knew, it seemed, had been counted down one by one and two by two, and thousands of nameless soldiers were lost with each additional, bleak expedition.

Anduin stayed long enough to see two of his own children born, a son and a daughter. His first and foremost duty to the kingdom was fulfilled, and yet in retrospect he regretted his decision to marry, for barring some sort of miracle life would _not_ go on, and all he'd done was help create two more lives-- two more people to love, and to love more profoundly than he ever thought possible at that-- who seemed destined only to die.

The explosive device they wrought was constructed by the High Tinker himself, utilizing a relic recovered from the lair of Malygos and re-sized with a specially built gnomish shrinking ray. After long and cautious experimentation, Gelbin was convinced the directed power of the relic could destroy anything, even the Lich King's near-invulnerable armor, even the Lich King himself. To be sure they prevented the possibility of the Lich King shielding himself, Maginor Dumas infused the device with arcane magic meant to expand into an anti-magic field at the moment of detonation.

The finished product was compact but appeared otherwise unremarkable, though each of the gnomes to whom Gelbin showed it seemed to consider it a marvel of engineering, and Maginor's two remaining colleagues nodded in a similarly approving fashion. Anduin didn't understand technology, the dragon artifact, or arcane spells well enough to comprehend why either group was so impressed.

But he didn't have to understand. All he had to do was detonate it.

"You will need to be very close," Mekkatorque told him at an early meeting to discuss the construction, pushing his oversized, widget-laden welding goggles above his forehead, and Anduin felt himself sized up in those wizened eyes, reminding him that many were depending upon him in this. "Within thirty feet."

"Twenty-five," Maginor corrected. "The anti-magic eclipse will only have a diameter of twenty-five feet. If we expand it any further, we'll weaken its intensity, and we risk Arthas being able to shield himself from the bomb."

"The _device_ ," Gelbin snapped, holding his ear to the dragon relic and listening as he rapped it with his arclight spanner several times. "We plan a device, and we plan a weapon. I don't build bombs."

"Apologies, High Tinker," Maginor said stiffly. "The device."

Maginor sighed and ran his ink-smudged fingers over the parchments in front of him, covered with the scribbled calculations of a complicated meeting of magic and technology. Though arcane magic was his specialty, Maginor knew an impressive amount about gnomish engineering-- just enough to frustrate Gelbin, it seemed. "If we could divert just a fraction of the power of the Focusing Iris to the anti-magic--"

"Yes yes the Iris is very powerful," Gelbin said crossly, "but if we compromise the energy from the Iris to expand the anti-magic field _or_ bolster the range of the explosion itself, we risk it simply not packing enough punch to destroy him."

"But the ion propulsion--"

"Is irrelevant." Irritably Gelbin threw down the spanner and leaned over to shove a large slateboard, his preferred means of working equations, in Maginor's direction with one chalky hand. "We'd have to add a gyrochromaton and use smaller mithril tubes. Use mithril tubes even three millimeters smaller and we'd reduce the velocity of the blast by a factor of four. Of course we could use a bigger micro-adjuster and shrink the Iris less, but he--" -- here Gelbin gestured grumpily at Anduin-- "has to be able to hide it under his clothes because if it's not discreetly sized, the whole thing is meaningless." He sat back in his high, small chair and folded his arms as though he'd proved his point.

Anduin had learned already not to slow the two of them down with inquiries when he could barely process their rapid-fire arguments about gigajoules, fuses, frameworks, hybrid boxes, samophlanges, dynes of magic absorption, and other engineering shorthand and arcane jargon. He was grateful for their formidable combined intellects, and at the beginning of the project he listened to their discussions alertly and did his best to follow along. In later days, as time wore on, he let their voices wash over him and allowed the technical specifics to pass him by, because he simply felt too tired to try to understand any of it.

"Then the anti-magic field cannot be relied upon past twenty-five feet," Maginor replied finally. He studied the slateboard, tapping his fingers, compared it again to his own notes, and added coolly, "I too would rather be safe than sorry."

Though both were genteel to the last, in the sense that while both got frosty, they never turned the corner into actual shouting matches, Mekkatorque and Dumas took an obvious dislike to one another over the months-long course of the project. Mekkatorque seemed put out that Dumas couldn't just use more spells to enhance the range of the anti-magic effect sufficient to match the explosive power of his device, but he didn't argue about it further, only pursed his lips.

Anduin said a silent prayer to the Light that the two could sustain their strained cooperation long enough to finish the weapon, and he said a second prayer that the five feet wouldn't make or break the plan.

Though he spoke of it to no one, Anduin was concerned about the state of Gelbin's sanity after his time working with saronite, despite the precautions he'd taken. He was prone to anger easily in a way he hadn't before, and he was often grouchy during the course of construction. He'd also developed a disturbing habit of muttering darkly to himself that Anduin didn't like. Anduin suspected Maginor Dumas felt the same.

Perhaps it was only stress. But though he'd come to care deeply for Gelbin, the state of the old gnome's mind was the least of his worries. 

Anduin had decided upon going himself, and no one could change his mind. His control of the Light was almost unparalleled among those who survived, and he would be able to use his power to detonate the device remotely. He hoped even perhaps to dive away and shield himself or his soldiers with the Light at the moment of impact a bit out of the anti-magic zone. In his hands, the task would not be the straight-up, no-doubt-about-it suicide mission it would be if given to one of their remaining foot soldiers or spies.

But he knew saving his own life was unlikely at best, and privately he doubted the mission itself. Anduin didn't truly believe he would succeed where so many before him had failed. What were the chances, after all, that the Lich King himself would come forth to meet their ragged band, two-thirds of whom were wrinkled grandmothers and unseasoned boys slinging swords over their shoulders that were too lengthy to wear at their hips? What were the odds that he could get the device within twenty-five feet of Arthas while he still drew breath?

But he had to try, while they still could try, and the task was not one he felt willing to set upon the shoulders of another. Gelbin made him a simple button inside a box to press, identical in tension to the one set into the device, and fervently Anduin practiced his use of the Light, trying to extend the range at which he'd be able to detonate it. Moving things without direct touch was more a mage's territory than a priest's, but he could and would do it. He practiced judging distances until he could make a near-instant, exacting assessment as to what constituted twenty-five feet.

Though he would not have admitted it aloud, in his heart he wanted to march on the citadel, not only because it was the final, honorable thing to do, because the responsibility should be his, or because he could spare the life of some other brave fool, but also for a twisted mess of additional reasons he couldn't sort. He wanted to go because hiding and fighting and waiting for death to find them was a terrible fate all its own, and he had had enough of the endless cycle. He wanted to go because five of the people he'd loved best in the world-- Bolvar, his father, Jaina, Magni and finally Velen-- had journeyed forth to Icecrown never to return. The successive series of blows had meant he never got the chance to finish grieving, and in his most pessimistic times, it simply seemed it was his turn to go die. Though he carried on, because that was what a king did, he was haunted by the losses. He felt fortunate that his wife had not known him long, so she did not know she'd married a grief-stricken shell of the bright-eyed and hopeful person he'd been.

Then again, in his rarer, more optimistic moments, if he could achieve this single victory, he thought, now was the time. The raids of mindless undead on his half-ruined city worsened by the week, and he had a family and wanted to protect what was his any way he could. He had a knotted tangle of reasons he wanted to go, and he couldn't tease each of them out even to himself.

He'd gotten taller and broadened significantly but had resigned himself to the fact that even as a grown man, he simply lacked the musculature necessary to bear the weight of a suit of full plate. He could don such armor, certainly, but he could not march long while wearing it, and the heaviness of steel on his arms and hands interfered with his spellcasting. But he had a breastplate fitted to the size of his chest, dredged up an old Wrynn helm to wear over his wool-knit hat, and made plans to lead a group to the foot of the Frozen Throne.

The evening before he left, he headed to Mekkatorque's makeshift laboratory to say farewell.

In recent weeks Gelbin had developed a habit of not answering when Anduin knocked on the door of his laboratory, forcing Anduin to enter unasked or go away indefinitely. Gnomes were often eccentric, but several times now Anduin had entered to find Gelbin in strange situations-- lying flat on his back on the floor, eyes as wide and sightless as their owner was unresponsive, or sitting and groaning and rocking back and forth as though he were in some kind of pain or inner torment. He always snapped out of it presently, but it was a distressing development.

"Gelbin?" he called, wanting to announce himself, but not wanting to wake the gnome if he was asleep. He stepped inside, and the laboratory appeared to be empty; the lights were shut off and Anduin was about to turn and go when he heard the muttering. Wondering and alarmed, he crept towards the source of the noise, turning down a little hall formed out of stacks of crates packed full of metal engineering objects he hadn't the names for. The voice didn't sound like Gelbin's-- it sounded low and gibbering and inhuman.

"The darkness will consume," it whispered. "Eat, eat, eat, eat them with darkness. Feast now..."

Anduin's heart beat faster, and he cautiously eased around a corner to see Gelbin huddled on the floor at the end of the makeshift hallway, facing the blank wall only inches away, mumbling words as though he was speaking to someone invisible, and rocking forward and back, forward and back. 

"They will die screaming in ice," Gelbin hissed at the wall, and Anduin's blood ran cold. He'd suspected, of course, but he hadn't wanted such hideously solid confirmation that Gelbin had sacrificed a portion of his sanity to this project.

"Screaming at the feast, the feast of ice and pain..." 

"Gelbin," he said faintly to the gnome's back, half expecting Gelbin to spin around and lunge at him, for Gelbin's face to be twisted, the visage of a monster... or the avatar of an Old God, seething with infinite evil. Anduin half expected to die then and there.

"Oh, Anduin," Gelbin said in his normal voice, turning as if he was surprised, sounding not at all embarrassed to be caught in the midst of such horrifying behavior. He stood up readily, clapped twice and said "Lights!" and all the nearby overhead lamps came on.

Standing stock-still, Anduin stared at him.

"Drink?" Gelbin offered. "I have an old bottle of gin I've been saving. You look like you could use a stiff drink."

"Where's Gelbin and what have you done with him?" Anduin asked slowly, and if it was a joke, there was enough of the hard edge of reality behind it to make the words come out gritted and wary.

Gelbin sighed and smiled. "I'm relaxing the rules on eating and drinking in the laboratory, yes. I think it's time," he said, gesturing broadly with both hands as he brushed past Anduin's legs, heading down the storage-space hallway of boxes. Anduin followed him with an unprecedented level of caution. "It has served its purpose, I'm retiring it. So, the gin? I'm having one."

"Please," Anduin said, still hanging back, but nothing about Gelbin seemed out of the ordinary now, same as after the previous episodes too.

Gelbin went digging into one of the drawers in his elongated workshop bench. "Excellent! My calculations indicate it will be very good."

Anduin eased into one of the larger chairs Gelbin kept around, because his knees felt weak. "Did I know you calculate how good your alcohol is going to taste?"

"Likely not," Gelbin said cheerfully. "I can show you the spreadsheets if you like."

Although gin was not his favorite, no one was all that picky anymore, and Gelbin poured them both perhaps excessively generous draughts. If he even began to finish his drink, the taste would not long bother him, Anduin thought, eyeing the volume of his glass. "Retiring your laboratory?" Anduin asked, processing it belatedly. "But there's so much more yet to tinker with," he said, puzzled. True, they would soon be forced to abandon this part of the city, for raids were frequent and every day they seemed more overrun, but they were not quite there yet, and Gelbin could no more give up his endless fiddling and innovation, Anduin thought, than he could stop being a gnome.

Gelbin pursed his lips and met Anduin's eyes, and Anduin saw at once that Gelbin understood with full awareness what was happening to him. A chill ran through Anduin's body, and he took a gulp of his gin, grateful for the quick heat that followed in his chest. Gelbin knocked his own drink back with an expressive snap of his wrist. Toasts were a thing of the past. Gelbin's practiced motion made Anduin wonder how much more gin he had stashed away as well as how fast he was going through it.

"Yes, it's time," Gelbin said, and then, plaintively, "Go win the day for us, your Majesty." They had been on a first-name basis for some months, by Anduin's request, and Anduin was a bit surprised by the formal use of his title. It seemed distancing.

"If I do, it'll be because of you," Anduin told him. "Thank you, my friend. I'm grateful for your brilliance."

"Be careful with my device," Gelbin grumbled. "It _will_ work," he said, glancing up at Anduin with pain etched in his eyes for just a moment. "Despite-- you know."

Anduin nodded slowly, for what could he say? Gelbin gave one decisive, firm nod, and his chipper look and lively demeanor returned. "You should probably go," Gelbin said, raising his eyebrows meaningfully, sounding wise and a little sad, and Anduin knew then that he didn't want to say goodbye. "Get a good night's rest."

But it was goodbye, most likely a final send-off too, because Anduin knew he probably would not return, and if he did manage to succeed and make it home, well. Anduin didn't know as much about the correlation between saronite and madness as he wished he did, but he knew Gelbin's mind stood a good chance of quickly deteriorating past the point of recognition. Looking into the old gnome's eyes, Anduin could tell Gelbin knew it too.

"Here, have one for the road," Gelbin said, and topped off the clear liquid in his glass.

Anduin put out his hand, and Gelbin shook it with his free one. 

Anduin pondered-- he didn't know if his sway over the Light would be enough to wholly cure a mind poisoned by saronite, but Gelbin wouldn't be working with the metal any more, and Anduin thought he should be able to slow the process down at the very least. "Gelbin. Before I go, will you let me try to cleanse-- "

"It's been a pleasure getting to know you, Anduin Wrynn," Gelbin interrupted, with an echo of his old untroubled cheerfulness, but intentionally cutting him off all the same.

Anduin fell silent, and then said, "Likewise," and he bowed respectfully, lowering his upper half the distance of a king to another king. Gelbin bowed to him in kind.

Anduin could tell Gelbin didn't want to acknowledge the progressing madness to him any more directly, didn't want his involvement, and didn't want to say any more poignant goodbyes. Anduin certainly wanted to help, and he would have preferred a slightly longer and more familiar farewell, but on some level he was glad Gelbin was comfortable enough with him to be curt. And while there had been a time when he would have pushed much harder with his offer of Light-given succor, he had learned how to take no for an answer. And so he nodded once more, turned and left.

He spent the remainder of the evening with his little family, holding his sleeping daughter in the crook of one arm, and playing with his son, whose merriment with the world was still contagious and irrepressible.

Anduin led his equally little army out early the next morning. Their numbers had dwindled away to thousands, where Stormwind had once proudly held millions, so he'd kept the group small, under a hundred. Yet he felt wracking guilt for bringing so many on what amounted to a probable suicide mission. He'd asked each person individually, making clear his request was no order. Yet no one declined to accompany Anduin, and a few made answers that humbled him. He'd done little, he thought, to earn the loyalty and devotion his subjects showed him time and time again.

He'd been to snowy locales before, of course, but Anduin was unprepared for the frozen hell of the mountain region of Icecrown. The cold seeped into his bones despite all his layers, stealing beneath his clothes to make him shiver.

Scouting carefully, they found a deserted, hidden recess in the mountains near where the Argent Vanguard had once erected palisades, and it was there that they made camp and stole one last rest the night before their assault on the citadel. They slept huddled together four to a tent for what little warmth they could find. Anduin could have had a pavilion to himself, but the biting cold was as hard on him as on any living being in the territory of the Lich King, and so he slept in a small plain tent alongside three soldiers, same as the rest of his army.

Anduin dreamed.

He dreamed of Gelbin rigging a primitive mechanism in his laboratory, attaching a lever and a pulley, busily moving around, then crossing the room and hoisting up a large gun. Anduin recognized it as a vaporizing gun of the gnome's own make.

Gelbin walked to and fro, connecting the elements together with wire and weeping as he pulled the lever. Anduin screamed for him to stop, not to do it, but Gelbin's small body was reduced instantly to a pile of gray dust sifting down. The details of his workshop were too sharp, the clarity perfect and horrible, and Anduin saw it all so clearly he felt he could reach out and sift his fingers through the cremated ashen remains of his friend. Anduin awoke in a sweat, his eyes full of tears and another cry on his lips, the two young boys on one side of him and the teenage girl on his other side all sitting up and looking at him with alarmed, frightened faces.

His heart hardened quickly enough then, his emotions temporarily shutting down, and he wiped his eyes and did not allow himself to weep any more than he already had in his sleep. They obviously wanted to comfort him, and it was touching, truly. In his young tentmates' concerned expressions, he saw the divine Light. But he assured them he was fine and apologized fairly eloquently, under the circumstances, for disturbing them. He excused himself and left them to their rest.

Dawn was hours away, but Anduin knew he would sleep no more that night, and he felt guilt for waking half the camp on top of his horror and grief. He tried to tell himself it was only a nightmare, but in his heart he knew otherwise.

He relieved the tired-looking old man awake outside on guard duty, sent him too to rest, and watched the remainder of the night out himself.

Soon enough it was time for everyone to be roused.

Though Anduin chose to attack shortly after dawn, the light-drinking vortex in the sky made the day as though it were night, and he knew with a sinking heart that even the sun answered to Arthas' burgeoning darkness, here.

He'd expected to have to fight their way up the stairs to the citadel, but the morning was eerily quiet, with few undead guarding the exterior of the citadel. Anduin wondered where in the world some remnants of civilization were being crushed, but the absence allowed them to climb the many steps mostly unhindered.

"Come out, Arthas, and face me!" he shouted, and he brandished his mace at the fortress doors. If he died and was remembered as egotistical, well, that would be that. He needed to be close. He needed the Lich King to come forth.

No answer came but the opening of the great doors, and a line of death knights filed out. Their eyes glowed bright blue against their dark armor.

"Close in!" he shouted, and if his battle cry lacked the sheer volume of his father's, it stirred his soldiers to arms nonetheless.

"Bottle them at the gate!" he shouted. "For Azeroth!"

And he charged, and they followed him.

The battle went ill. He hadn't expected otherwise, and as he shielded himself and cast spell after healing spell, at first Anduin thought death would find them all swiftly. Even if he awoke as a servant of the Lich King, at least... at least he wouldn't be cold anymore. At least he wouldn't be afraid. Even if he came back as one of the soulless damned, it was a fate many others far greater than himself had suffered. It had been pure arrogance to dream the mission might go otherwise.

Though they were hopelessly outnumbered and outmatched, for a longer time than Anduin expected they held their own at the citadel doors, so that few of the enemy could join the fight at once. The fortitude and ferocity of his elderly soldiers particularly surprised him, for they grappled with the undead with a determination Anduin hadn't anticipated. But the Scourge were devastatingly strong and their ranks endless. Each time one death knight went down, another appeared, climbing over the corpses of their fallen brethren when need required. The relentlessness of their attacks drove Anduin and his band back away from the fortress to the top of the steps, only for more Scourge to emerge and finally surround them.

In the resulting melee, at a moment when he chose to save a life with the Light rather than renew his shield, he sustained a ringing blow to the back of his helm. For a second his vision blurred and went gray around the edges, and he saw flickering star-spots. He felt faint, but a pair of arms slipped around him even as Fearbreaker slid from his limp fingers and was lost.

At first, Anduin thought it was one of his own soldiers who had caught him, preventing him from tumbling down half a hundred stairs, but the embrace tightened, squeezing his arms against his sides, and he knew then it was one of the enemy. Anduin thrashed to get free, but the arms that held him were implacable iron, like steel harder than the dark blue-black plate that covered them. Desperately he slammed his head backwards and the back of his helm connected with his attacker's forehead, but the arms around him never loosened. The maneuver was foolish, made wholly on instinct, and his head spun, for his helm was not well padded, and it was two hits to that part of his head within fifteen seconds. As his vision swam again, Anduin twisted his neck to glimpse his attacker and saw his father's face.

For a second he thought he was hallucinating.

"Father!" he shouted, but his father did not acknowledge his cry, and in seizing him one of his gauntlets had chanced across the globular bulge just below Anduin's waist. His father was evidently aware enough of him to recognize him, to investigate. He groped at the lowest part of Anduin's stomach for a few moments, but the specially sewn pocket that held the device was buried beneath numerous layers of clothing.

Anduin struggled in his grip, partly of course because he wanted to get away, but partly because he wanted to turn around and behold his father. But he was no match for Varian Wrynn, alive or dead. His father had been a massive and experienced hand-to-hand fighter, one of the greatest gladiators ever to prowl the combat pits, to hear Broll when he'd recounted the stories while in his cups.

Though elven civilization had some deeply entrenched gender-stereotyped expectations of its own, it lacked others particular to human culture, and Anduin recalled, suddenly and vividly, the sight of Broll's face twisted in raw, unashamed grief for his friend as he wept at the memorial service that lacked a body to inter.

He shook off the memory even as he strove in vain to be free from his father's arms. But going up against his father one-on-one would have been a laughable suggestion even before death infused him with the terrible, monstrous strength of the intelligent undead. His father needed only one arm to clasp him tightly.

"Search him," his father said, and his father rotated them in time for Anduin to see a girl no more than sixteen take a mortal injury to the chest and slump dead and bleeding to the ground. To his shame and sorrow, he could not recall her name.

The orc who'd delivered the death-blow turned and raised an eyebrow as he approached, striking his freshly blooded axe into the ice. He pulled off Anduin's heirloom helm and hat and threw them away, staring him down before running his hands over the sides of Anduin's body. In no time at all he located the roundness of the device in front, tracing plate-covered fingers along the curve of the sphere. Efficiently he lifted Anduin's tabard and rummaged through the layers of fabric. Tabard, tunic, and overcoat were the garments that hung down the longest, almost to his knee, though he also wore shirt and breastplate. But soon enough the death knight found the pocket and withdrew its precious contents. He peered at the device as he pulled it out, then immediately handed it over so Anduin's father could examine it.

The metal sphere was six inches in diameter, small enough to hide with only a minor distention beneath his heavy overcoat and all his other layers of clothing, light enough to cup in both hands, and his father could hold it comfortably in one. At the top was a slightly raised squared-off safety panel and a black button beneath, in case Anduin wasn't able to use the Light when the time came and needed to detonate it manually. Or in case he died but another had the chance to fulfill their quest.

They'd brainstormed so long, tried so hard to make contingency plans, to account for as many scenarios as possible.

"Their leader is the king of Stormwind. He carries a bomb," his father said flatly in his ear.

"Father!"

His father's tone did not change, though Varian paused briefly. "Yes, my lord. As you wish."

The battle was nearly over, Anduin saw, looking back, and as he saw those slain his heart broke a little. His men and women, young and old, his loyal subjects turned soldiers by utter necessity. They'd acquitted themselves well. Some stood around disarmed. Many lay on the ground, some dead and more wounded, and a few knelt with their arms up, having surrendered, Anduin supposed, not that it would save them. He saw Maginor Dumas sprawled dead with his mouth open and a bloody hole perfectly centered through his sternum. Mages were sorely needed in Stormwind to hide the smoke from their Scourge-burning fires, but Maginor had decided at the last minute that he wanted to accompany their group, and Anduin hadn't the heart to deny him. _Let me see this through with you, your Majesty._

"Keep a dozen alive. Kill the rest," his father said to his dark brethren as they passed a group of death knights, and a small massacre of those still living began.

"Father, please," he begged. "No, don't!" Disregarding his cries, his father walked Anduin forward before him, away from the remnants of his dead and dying army, forcing him to enter the citadel.

An arcane transporter lit with smoldering blue mist as they approached. The flash of light as they stepped into the center of the rune was blinding for a second, but it brought them into a hall facing a large central chamber, open with grated, empty walkways.

Anduin's attention was arrested by the sight of visible spirits rising in the strangely open spaces before them. Anduin could see the wispy forms slowly ascending, but he could not stand to look long at their twisted spectral faces.

As his father moved them forward he risked a glance down, and the sight of the drop was dizzying, but the walkway was wide, the arms around him were tight, and his father's steps were sure and certain. The center of the tower was a huge spike of ice, he saw, a stabilizing cylinder, the glistening frozen heart of the citadel.

His father was walking him to a portal-rune at the center of all the walkways, one last destination, he knew instinctively. He didn't want to step onto the glowing rune any more than he wanted to stay on the walkways with restless souls streaming all around them, but his father moved him easily without his cooperation, driving Anduin before him into the radiant tendrils of light.

Anduin closed his eyes this time but was nonetheless momentarily blinded again by the bright illumination of the portal magic. He felt the frigid wind in his hair and on his face and guessed where they were prior to his vision returning. They were atop the fortress in the open air, with an even more brutal and seemingly endless fall to every side. Alongside the whistle of the abrasive wind, a soft moaning was audible.

The Lich King was seated before them on a throne up a flight of steps of pure ice. To be in his presence was to know cold.

Suspended above the Lich King was a gruesomely burned human body, hung naked and spread-eagled. Anduin hadn't thought to see anything that appeared warm in this place, but the spiked manacles at the figure's wrists and ankles glared red-hot orange, as if they'd just been removed from a molten pit of fire. 

Anduin thought it was a corpse until he realized it was the source of the soft groaning he was hearing. As he stared at the charred body he saw it stir, its head lolling a little at its minutely rising and falling chest, its eyes of flame blinking black and opening again. His first thought was to heal them, to help the person, who seemed to be on fire from the inside out, but there was nothing he could do from this distance, or at all really for that matter. The figure had been a man, once, that much was still evident. There was something about it... but he didn't get the chance to consider long, for the Lich King raised his head.

Though Anduin could not make out much of the face beneath the helm, he felt Arthas' gaze like a pressure against his whole body, pinning him as if he were no more than an insect fastened down in a collector's display. Fear gripped his heart and he could not move. Anduin's feet dragged numbly along the summit but his father brought them closer, his steps inexorable.

But part of Anduin stirred within, because his father was bringing him before the Lich King. The device was there, and Anduin didn't need to have hands on it to blow them all into oblivion. This was the very occurrence he'd come here for.

He hardly dared to hope.

Anduin judged the portal-rune to be about fifty feet from the foot of the throne, and the steps up were wide and many, at least twenty stairs. His pulse picked up, but his father halted a dozen feet away from the steps-- still too far, Anduin thought despairingly. He knew at some point in his childhood he'd learned the equation to calculate a sloped distance upwards, but now he could scarcely think.

"My son," his father said to the Lich King, high above them. In life, Varian Wrynn had had a low and somber voice; in death, his voice was more resonant but also scraping, indifferent and cold. Everything about this place was cold, and Anduin doubted he would ever feel warm again.

"He led the charge," his father said emotionlessly. "What should we do with the bomb, Master?"

The force Anduin felt in his very bones lessened as the Lich King's helmet moved fractionally from him, to focus upon his father behind him. He almost shook from relief, however momentary. 

"You have done well, Frostcaller," the Lich King said, and with one hand outstretched he called the device forth. The sphere of metal floated up to him, and Anduin's heart began to pound, adrenaline surging through him. The Lich King had grown complacent in his power, overconfident. This was Anduin's moment. He sought the Light, found the internal trigger and went to detonate the device.

But nothing happened. The Lich King sat his throne and held the weapon before him, trapped in a blazing, clear blue cloud for examination.

"Inevitable that you last stragglers would begin to attempt feeble tricks," the Lich King said at length. "Did you truly think you could hurt me with this?" And lifting his hand, he sent the device sailing upwards into the air far above them. "I have grown more powerful than you insignificant mortals can probably fathom."

Anduin watched as the sphere arced out across the sky, spinning over and over in a forlorn spiral to the east, growing ever more distant. He watched until he couldn't see it any longer, and then he shouted in frustration, rage and anguish-- to have come so close only to be thwarted here, at the last. Mindless and despairing, he struggled fruitlessly once again in his father's arms, and he discovered the Lich King had a cruel laugh.

Suddenly the burned figure above spoke a single moaning word, just one, but loaded with every ounce of emotion that was missing from his father's deadened voice. It took Anduin a second to realize it was his name that was emerging slow and pained from the blackened throat.

And he knew the voice. Oh, he knew it.

"Bolvar...?" he whispered. Bolvar was-- alive? It couldn't be, no human could survive being so... charred and continue to live, but--

The Lich King's spiked helm inclined slightly, and he sounded amused. "Still in his place of honor, as you can see. A permanent fixture, defying all expectations." As his eyes rose and dropped in horror between Bolvar and the Lich King, Anduin felt every malevolent word like a puncture to his heart. "His suffering, too, is likely beyond your imagining."

To Anduin's father he said, "Frostmourne will feast. And bring the corpses." Anduin's eyes fell to the blue-glowing sword alight with death runes, and his father began to walk him forward to the steps. But Anduin felt the Lich King's gaze upon him again, and his father halted. "As for him. Take him to Valanar. Tell him for Dalaran. But tell him also -- he must share." The faint curl of smile beneath the helm suggested that this, too, was somehow an act of cruelty.

"Bolvar!" Anduin shouted as his father bodily turned him about and marched him back to the portal-rune. Had Bolvar been thus for four-- no, almost five years now? Chained up, burning alive or dead in utter torment? Tears pricked at Anduin's eyes, and he struggled against his emotions harder than he'd fought his father's pitiless hold on him. He would not cry, not now.

As they walked, he spoke to his father, for there were many things he wished he'd found the chance to say, and while he couldn't say them all now, he wanted to talk for the sake of his own sanity.

"Father," he said. "You should know you have two grandchildren."

His father said nothing.

"I wish you could meet them," he said wistfully, and he reconsidered his words half a second after he said them and realized they weren't quite what he meant-- as things stood, he did not want his father to ever lay eyes on his children-- but it seemed best to plow on rather than correct himself in his rambling despair. "I understand now why you tried so hard all those years to keep me protected and safe. I'd do anything to keep them from harm."

The conversation remained one-sided, and his father continued to push him forward. "Their names are Bolvar and Elania. We named Elania after Diana's grandmother." 

His father didn't seem likely to answer, but in a way, that made it easier to speak the words that were in his heart.

"It's been hard without you," Anduin said, and his voice broke as it hadn't in years; he'd pushed away much of his sorrow and pain, numbed himself to carry on, but with his father's arms around him, the anesthetized exterior was suddenly stripping away. "I've missed you so much."

His father's steps, so swift and sure, faltered the slightest bit.

Hope careened through Anduin's heart. "Can you fight him, Father? I know you're stronger than this. If you only try--!"

But his father's steady walk resumed without further hesitation. "This isn't you," Anduin continued urgently. "I know it isn't, and I know deep inside, you do too. You're Varian Wrynn, King of Stormwind, Father. You must fight him-- you don't have to be his slave!"

But his father continued apace, and nothing Anduin said after that produced any perceptible effect.

The rooms his father brought him into next were different from the rest of the citadel that he'd seen-- the Lich King's fortress seemed spartan and spare, even or perhaps especially the Frozen Throne itself. These rooms were notably more luxurious, with red and dark gray stone walls resplendent with rich crimson tapestries, and velvet-looking carpets covering sections of the floor to either side. Orbs like crystal balls but swirling red inside were nestled in stands here and there. Anduin almost thought he could hear music, although when he tried to focus and listen, he heard only silence, the rustling of clothing, quiet but strangely lyrical voices.

"This isn't you. Please, try to remember who you are. If you would only try," he pleaded on, but he floundered and fell silent under the numerous stares that fell on him as they walked through the comparatively baroque rooms.

All the undead in the rooms they passed through were high elves, dead re-animated elves, looking at him not as though he were an enemy to be stricken down but rather as if he were a particularly mouthwatering morsel of food to be eaten. And Anduin recognized them. He knew the word from a war council, long ago, back when they still had war councils.

San'layn. High elves from Prince Kael'thas Sunstrider's ill-fated expedition to Northrend. Anduin himself had been a child when that had happened, but he remembered being vaguely informed about the carnage in passing. Bolvar had made efforts to shield him from some of the gorier details of world events, but even as a young boy he'd gathered the idea.

His father steered him through an arched entryway into a room of grandeur, the air thick with sorcery Anduin could almost feel prickling on his skin. Three huge windows-- no, not windows at all, but scrying mirrors-- offered shimmering images of different locales in the Lich King's domain. The San'layn were watchers, commanders, advisers...

"Father!" he said, desperately, as they ascended a low platform and stopped. "Father, please--"

"For your labors in Dalaran," his father said tonelessly. "You're to share him."

He tried again, one last time. A trio of dead elves were looking at him, but he didn't return the gaze--he twisted his head again, craning his neck to look at his father. "Father, if you can still hear me-- I love y--"

The last word ended unfinished as his father unexpectedly shoved him forward and down. Stumbling, Anduin landed on his knees on the stone at three sets of feet. Heedless of their owners, Anduin scrambled around to get his first good look at his father. 

The creature who had been Varian Wrynn was tall and grim, his skin a pinched and ashen white, his eyes glowing blue, the familiar scarring that crisscrossed his face coal-black and discolored in death. He'd traded his shining blue and gold armor for a full suit of the creeping blue-black saronite plate. His thick hair, in life always tied back one way or another, hung loose and flowing well past his shoulders. The circular line of a deep gash, sewn shut but unhealed, bloodied dark as his scar, was revealed above the gorget that only partially covered his neck. His father had been killed, he surmised, by a vicious strike that had ripped open his throat, maybe even decapitated him. Shalamayne was gone; the sword at his hip was a colossal and intricate two-handed runeblade.

"Father," he said again, but his father didn't even look at him.


	2. -2-

"You should stay, Frostcaller," one of the elves said to his father in flawless Common. Its voice was cold, persuasive and otherworldly, every word measured. It was not a voice that brooked room for argument, and Anduin could tell the accent was aristocratic even though he wouldn't have been able to place the origin of the accent from sound alone.

"No," his father answered. "There are many corpses to be brought to the Master's chambers." For just a moment his father's eyes fell on him. Then he was gone, turning and leaving, his footfalls resounding.

"Father," he whispered, to himself this time. His father did not glance back.

Anduin turned his head to look at his new captors only to find two of the three had silently crouched down behind him, so their faces were inches from his. Anduin jerked backwards involuntarily. The dark-haired elf who'd remained standing laughed at his moment of instinctual panic. 

The elves were hideous, were monsters-- their eyes flared yellow, their skins all shades of corpses, pale alabaster and ice blue and a dead, rotted gray tinge. The one in the middle had white hair, the other two dark.

They were garbed in elaborate silks, but their chests were partly bared, and instead of simple gloves, their hands were half-wrapped as if in preparation for mummification. All three wore masks over their lower faces suggestive of long, bestial teeth.

Anduin swallowed.

"How lovely you are," the white-haired elf said in that same lilting Common, and this was the owner of the ethereal yet commanding voice; it was this San'layn who'd addressed Anduin's father. In Thalassian it added, "Look at his face," and slowly reached towards him as if attempting to touch a frightened, skittish animal. Anduin shrank back an inch, but then stilled, allowing the elf to take him gently by the chin and tilt his face up. "Such a sad boy," the elf said, still in Thalassian, and ran the pad of its thumb lightly several times over Anduin's dry, chapped lips.

Anduin feared to long hold the white-haired elf's predatory golden eyes; its voice was nearly hypnotic.

"He smells of his journey here," the standing elf said spitefully in Thalassian. "Of--" it said a word in Thalassian that Anduin did not know-- "--and sweat."

"No, he smells of the blood pounding under his skin," the kneeling dark-haired elf argued, voice deep and authoritative, and its nostrils flared as its chest subtly rose. "His pulse throbs to be here," the elf said, and the movement of its lower face beneath the mask might have been a slight smile. Its yellow eyes were wider and somehow more aggressive than those of the other two. "He smells beautiful."

"You can wash him, then," the white-haired elf judged, rising from its knee, and the corners of its monster's eyes folded in what was most definitely a smirk. 

The other elf didn't seem bothered or diminished to be so tasked. "It will be my pleasure," it said, and Anduin saw sadism in its gaze. Anduin could not even guess at what it was thinking, but he could tell the San'layn accorded greater malice towards the living than did any of the mindless ranks of Scourge, or the savage but emptied-out death knights like his father, and his heart filled with dread.

"Will you follow, young king?" the dead elf said in Common.

So they knew who he was. But of course they would-- he'd named 'Frostcaller' father.

Anduin had little to gain by resisting. Probably only rougher treatment, additional torment before they killed him... or after they killed him. 

And they would kill him. Anduin knew he was not getting out of this alive. Then again, if there was even the remotest possibility that he could make an escape, if there should be any opening at all, he wouldn't be able to seize it if he was being carried to and fro like a hog trussed-up for slaughter.

Anduin nodded swiftly. "I'll follow."

The elf stood and offered him a hand up, and its glowing yellow eyes seemed amused when Anduin ignored the overture, instead precipitating himself to his feet on his own. Then the elf turned on its heel and began to walk. 

Anduin followed.

The elf led him out of the luxurious halls to another runed transporter. The creature half-bowed, mockingly, extending an arm to gesture that Anduin should step onto the portal-rune first. Anduin obeyed, and he didn't try to run when he arrived in another hallway a second before the dead elf. Eventually they wound down and out into an inner, open courtyard at the bottom of the fortress. Anduin's boots crunched on snow, and the elf led him to what appeared to be a small natural pool a dozen feet in diameter. Anduin wondered why the water wasn't frozen over, and he might even have asked, but the elf turned to him and placed its gauze-wrapped hands on his waist. The elf's half-exposed hands were long-fingered, and they moved like two efficient spiders over his body. He wanted to draw back, but he remained still and cooperated as the dead elf disrobed him swiftly, layer by layer, starting with his tabard. His breastplate made a solid noise as it connected with the snow pack. 

The finality of the sound reminded Anduin of the old blacksmith who'd made it; as he'd fitted the armor on Anduin, measuring straps for him using nothing more than eyes honed by long experience, there had been no hope in his face.

The San'layn shrugged off Anduin's thick overcoat, then knelt at his feet to remove his boots and his woolen socks. Anduin was forced to put a hand on the elf's cloth-padded shoulder for support, or he would have lost his balance. The elf did not react to his touch.

Anduin did not show or express his discomfort, but the snow felt miserable under his bare feet. Cold should numb (and would in no time, he had no doubt), but as yet he was not numbed at all. The snow burned his skin painfully.

Anduin shivered as the elf rose and removed his woolen tunic and then his linen undershirt and then finally his pants, and in another climate his cheeks might have felt warm as the dead hands came to rest on his smallclothes, then pushed them down.

The San'layn looked him over, eyes lingering in a place it had no business surveying. There was little to see, anyway. Anduin didn't need to glance down to know his balls had retracted, pulling up rigid against his body, and his penis had shrunken and likewise retreated, nearly inverting. 

The elf reached out and touched him there, lightly at first, and Anduin sucked in a breath.

"Please don't," he said, shuddering.

The San'layn continued to caress him, tiny leisurely movements he supposed were meant to draw out and firm up his flesh, blighted with cold. "Tell me. Do you eat meat?"

"Of course," Anduin said. Every time he unclenched his jaw to speak, his teeth chattered.

The elf raised its eyes to his face. "The lambs would say 'please don't' if they could talk, don't you think?" it asked mockingly.

Anduin stood agonized up to his ankles in the snow and deeply uncomfortable with this turn of events, trying not to openly shiver or show his pain and entirely failing on both counts. "Is that your way of saying you're going to eat me?"

"It's my way of telling you your preferences matter little to me," the elf said.

But the elf stopped touching him there and leaned forward, placing one hand on his shoulder, its face near his temple as it inhaled deeply. 

_It was smelling him._

The realization distracted him for a moment, all his muscles tensing; he feared it was about to bite into the flesh of his exposed neck or his cheek. Instead, sliding its hand down from his shoulder to his chest, the elf used the opportunity to casually shove him backwards into the pool.

Taken off guard-- though he shouldn't have been, he knew they wanted to wash him-- it was not what he was expecting, and he tumbled backwards without even a chance of regaining his balance.

Anduin's whole body seized up as he plunged into the shock of icy water. Had he thought he was cold before, in the presence of the Lich King, or standing naked in the snow? Madness. His heart felt as though it would burst right out of his chest. His face didn't even go all the way underwater, but even after he wrenched his head and neck above the surface he couldn't seem to fill his lungs with air, like the freezing water was constricting all the muscles in his torso. As he panted in tiny frantic breaths, hands on his shoulders gave him little warning before forcing his head under.

Immersed fully, and desperate for air in no time at all, Anduin writhed and tried not to open his mouth to scream, because he knew to breathe in a lungful of water at this temperature would almost certainly mean his death. He had the fraction of a second he needed to wonder why he cared, for he didn't know why he wanted to live.

Then as the elf jerked his shoulders back up, the water rushing over him went hot. The temperature change was swift, from near freezing to what would have felt too hot even if he hadn't been chilled to the bone, and Anduin shouted as his head broke the surface, because in the sudden heat, after the intense cold, his skin burned as though he'd been caught in a mage's flamestrike. And yet the hot water burning his skin was infinitely better than the ice bath. It hurt, yes, but it was a better pain, a less deadly pain, and his body perceived it as less tortuously severe. So though the change was too extreme, he welcomed it nonetheless. His cry trailed off into a few small whimpers, and then he made himself be silent.

The flow of water was strong, more powerful than any underground spring would be naturally. The elf reached shallowly into the steaming water and began to scrub roughly at Anduin's skin with its hands.

As the minutes passed, the fiery burning on his skin subsided, and the heat felt incredible, blissful. Anduin's head and face were cold still, but that didn't matter. His contracted muscles relaxed enough for his bladder to let go, and he didn't fight the urge. Strong hands rubbed over his hair, pulling the back of his head back down as he soaked in the hot water, fingertips digging into his scalp and twisting this way and that. Pleasuring him. Relaxing him.

Then suddenly the water went ice cold again. 

Again Anduin was almost instantly reduced to gasping for breaths. The elf continued to splash and touch and rinse him as though the temperature hadn't altered at all.

Every bit of residual warmth felt drained out of him by the time the elf seized him under the arms, pulling him up and dragging him out into the frigid air. The creature released him, and he lay on the crisp crust of the snow, contorting and gasping again as he looked up at the dead elf standing over him.

"You endure so little, yet," the San'layn said. "And take it so hard."

Dimly, Anduin knew it was a insult. He didn't care. He cared that he had narrowly escaped drowning and was now freezing to death, feeling like a cadaver in the making, wet with ice water, lying in snow. He cared that his eyes felt like they would either freeze open or freeze shut. He cared that he had failed and that everyone he loved was dead or would die, and everything that he loved in the world would be lost.

The elf regarded him another moment, the corpse-wrappings on its hands dripping with ice water, before bending and gathering him up and lifting him, and Anduin didn't know how a creature so lifeless could feel so warm. Its dead flesh was probably not more than cool room temperature, but against his frigid skin even the moderate difference felt like warm, longed-for relief. Helplessly he sought its heat. He pressed his hands to the creature's chest, bent his head closer and tucked it, feeling the relative warmth of its chest against his ear and the side of his face. He leaned sideways with every inch of naked flesh he could touch to the San'layn, and the rest of him shuddered with the cold.

Vaguely Anduin was aware of being carried back through the halls. He closed his eyes and wept and shivered, and at last he was placed down on a plush, blessedly heated surface. He heard echoing, dark musical laughter, and he glanced in a daze around the room, which was far smaller than the other San'layn chambers he'd seen. He lay on a circular bed-couch, in the traditional style of the Quel'dorei. The silks on the bed were crimson, like the draperies over the walls, and they were as blissfully warm as if a fire toasted him from beneath, and a thick duvet was pulled overtop him. A few braziers were scattered here and there, and in one corner was an oddly tidy pile of discarded bones. Human bones, or humanoid. Most of them looked... gnawed. Many were snapped in half. _To get to the marrow._ The room smelled like an old slaughterhouse fallen into disuse, where the blood had simply been allowed to dry, the carcasses to putrefy until they rotted away to bones, leaving the smell very faint.

But he temporarily shrugged off the odor, because all he could think about was feeling warmth again, even superficially. For it felt like the cold had sunken far into his flesh, and even this new heat wasn't penetrating more than skin deep. He thought of the expression 'chilled to the bone' and wondered if this was its origin, this inability to get warm after losing so much of his natural heat, and he continued to huddle under the pleasurably warm covers and shiver.

He might have fallen asleep, he didn't know. But he blinked and the elf who'd bathed him and carried him back was staring hungrily down at him.

"He wakes," the white-haired elf said in Thalassian from the doorway, approaching the bed lightly, and then all three stood over him. Their masks so evocative of fangs were pulled down, exposing hideous mouths with teeth to match, and yet it was apparent all three would have been handsome while alive. He looked from face to face. The elf with white hair had thick, sensual lips, and the one who'd bathed him had thin lips, proud and austere, but all three had identical distended fangs. He stared at them, transfixed.

Their teeth, the washing, the deliberate significance of the pile of snapped-in-half bones in this otherwise pristine space told him everything he needed to know-- everything they wanted him to know. _They're a different flavor of Scourge,_ someone had told him, in hushed tones, long ago, before nearly everyone was dead, and Anduin couldn't think who it had been. Mathias? _They drink blood. They eat both flesh and life._

They were going to eat him, then. He'd feared as much just by the way they'd looked at him, they way they'd touched him and inhaled near his body. At least the Lich King could not bring him back as a slave if his counselors were picking him out of their teeth. Or... could they? They could, he knew they could. The Lich King had legions of bleached bones marching about as fleshless servile skeletons.

The thought was ghastly but... even if that should be his fate, at least what was left wouldn't be recognizably him anymore. An empty-faced Anduin-corpse would not haunt his wife and children the way his father's hollow face haunted him now.

But he didn't want to be eaten, and as the dead elves surrounded the bed, some essential piece of humanity in him fought the idea even at the last. Anduin's muscles flooded with adrenaline to fight, and he even began to move, but the two dark-haired elves knelt at opposite sides of the bed and each caught one of his arms, holding him down. The white-haired elf slipped gracefully onto the bed over him.

"Our hunger is... unending," the white-haired one sighed in Common.

Not quite in unison, the three elves bent their heads to his body. Bright, stinging pain chimed at each of his wrists and at his throat as they bit into him. He whimpered rather than screamed. The white-haired elf slid a hand over his groin and rubbed once. The warmth of the heated bed had finally begun to ease the wintry torment of his flesh some, and there was more to touch now. He jerked at the handling. But the elf did not continue to stroke him, only rested its hand there, and then all Anduin could do was moan. They didn't suck out his blood so much as they sipped, elegantly, from his pierced veins.

While it hurt, the sensuousness of having those three mouth and tongues wetly teasing his flesh dimmed the pain of the bites, even as he knew he was dying.

But he didn't die. They drank from his body and he drifted. His mind floated away for a time, and it felt like a mercy.

Then the elf that had given him the ice-bath switched places with the white-haired elf and leaned over him, its head poised over his hips. He looked up, afraid, as the elf breathed cool air on his groin-- deliberately, he had not seen them breathe before except when it had sniffed at him-- and then it engulfed Anduin's sex in its mouth.

Anduin had never asked Diana for this... act... though he had long wondered what it would feel like to have a mouth on his cock. He hadn't felt it appropriate to request such self-centered, wanton toying from the mother of his children, whom he'd watched suffer to bring their babies forth in the same bed where they'd been conceived, all in the midst of the impending end of the world, and she had never offered or done it on her own and that had been that.

But the elf swallowed his member to the root, and he reflexively opened his legs wider without thinking, yearning for the ecstasy of it...

...until he felt sharp teeth biting deeply into the skin of his groin. He screamed more from fear than pain, for it didn't hurt much more than the previous bites, and the elf didn't clamp its jaws down or intensify the pressure once his blood was flowing. But he knew he was bleeding, for he felt the pressure of rhythmic sucking, amplifying the sensation of the elf swallowing around every inch of his sex, its tightly closed throat rippling and squeezing him as much as his hand or a woman's parts ever could.

Anduin melted into the feeling, hedonistic and insane and terrifying though it was, and he rocked his hips, because even though thrusting made him feel the teeth latched into his groin, the pleasure was greater than the pain. Until he felt something solid flutter at the entrance to his body, then push very slightly, seeking admittance. Then he froze.

"No," he said, futilely. "Nononono." The mouth on his cock moved away, leaving him aching and needful and abandoned and appalled.

"Yes," came the wet, hissing answer in his ear. 

But the finger that had stroked his anus was replaced by a tongue, high cheekbones pressing against the inner parts of his buttcheeks, and it was not the abrupt rape Anduin feared, but a perverse and filthy seduction.

He writhed at the feeling of the cool tongue probing him where no one's mouth should ever go, first teasing at his flesh with light licks, and then delving deeper inside him, bigger than a finger but more supple and deliriously sensual, the flexibility and slipperiness making the penetration something he could not resist physically or mentally either, and the other two elves had taken to running their mouths all over him. The scent of freshly spilled blood was in the air even stronger than before, and as Anduin glanced down dizzily he realized they'd smeared the blood from his groin upwards, from the juncture of his thighs to his chest and stomach and beyond. And they were licking it off him. 

He moaned.

And then it hurt badly. All the depraved gratification from the creature's mouth was forgotten as a finger was forced inside him after all, sinking in and thrusting in a parody of the sex act to which he was accustomed.

His anus stung in pain so exquisite and overwhelming it was like pleasure, and he held absolutely still, for the slightest movement increased the agony tenfold.

The elf between his legs fastened its mouth to his body as it finger-fucked him, kissing caressingly on his inner thigh. A different set of fingers stroked his balls, and he wasn't sure whose fingers they were. The other two elves lay closely to either side of him, stealing his regained warmth away. But the bodily instinct to be still served him well, and he lay there and suffered through the mix of acute pain and pleasure as lips kissed at him and tongues licked. After a short time the pain began to fade out.

He felt their hands wandering idly over his stomach, arms, and pelvis, always moving, never still, their hips pressed to either side of his. A set of razored canines sank into his left shoulder, then moved down to his nipple. Anduin looked to the side and saw silky white hair and heavy-lidded eyes thick with lust, and then the third elf's mouth was biting hard into his throat, exposed when he'd turned his head. The dark-haired elf, the one who hadn't bathed him, its bite was cruelest, as if it sought to hurt more than to feed. Anduin felt like his neck was being torn, worried by its sharp teeth.

The one between his parted legs pushed at least one more finger into his body below. Anduin didn't know how many long fingers were inside him, it might have been only two, but then there was a third or a fourth and all he knew was that it was too much, more than he could stand.

"NO!" he screamed, but they held him down with their strong hands and their biting kisses. The pain was excruciating now, more intense than he knew any pain could be.

"Again," the dark-haired elf to his left said in his ear, as if drilling him at a maths lesson or with sword and shield in the training yard. This elf spoke like a sadistic tutor, but its voice was like dirt blown over a grave. "Give us your music."

It wanted him to cry out again? He stared sideways at it.

"Sing for me, king of Stormwind," the elf who'd bathed him whispered, its soft cadence making a grotesque mockery of romance, still thrusting its fingers between his legs.

They were enjoying his pain, that much was quite clear. They'd drunk of his blood, and perhaps they were going to eat his flesh, but something in him rebelled at the idea of being their plaything. He bit his lips bloody to maintain his silence, refusing to give in to the hatefully issued order or the cloyingly murmured demand. The white-haired elf smiled at his resistance and gently set its mouth to his, kissing and licking the blood off his lips before snaking its tongue into his mouth, and he could tell its tongue was bleeding because he could taste the difference in its blood and his own. A bitten tongue or accidentally chewed cheek tasted coppery; the San'layn's blood was metallic in a different way and notably cool, and Anduin twisted his head to spit, to get away from the too-intimate squirm of muscle in his mouth. The dark-haired elf to his side seized his hand and painfully twisted backwards. He gasped and the dead elf pressed his hand even farther, until he was in agony, and he began to scream just before he heard the bones in his wrist snap away from the bones in his arm.

Then he screamed as much as they wanted. And when the sluggishly bleeding tongue slipped back into his mouth, he didn't fight again.

He might have lost consciousness, he wasn't sure, but when he came back to himself he was alone, feeling weak and kittenish. His wrist didn't hurt now and neither did his asshole. He was still lying on his back, and his limbs were languid. He had the feeling of swimming surrounded by soft, thin fabric, as though he was suspended on a sheet in a huge space filled to the brim with veils both taut and billowing loose, hanging in all different directions, vertically and horizontally, as if he hovered at the center of a sphere where gravity didn't exist.

He couldn't see, all was blackness, but he could feel the rustling layers of silk all around him. With an effort he pushed one curtain aside and felt more behind it, softness to every side of him, brushing all over against his naked body. But he could breathe, and the atmosphere wasn't oppressive. Rather he had the impression of vast emptiness all around him, just fine silken draperies, so thin as to be transparent, for feet 

_twenty-five feet_

or miles. He felt feeble, yes, but warm and comfortable, light enough to float on the strangely still air. His body didn't tear through the curtain he was lying on and fall into the nothingness below, so perhaps he was that weightless.

He wondered if he was dead. If so, the afterlife was stranger than he'd thought possible. For a moment, as if the option were made possible by this thought, he could see himself from above, and his pallid, naked body was covered with traces of smeared and licked-off blood, his skin littered with livid bite marks at wrists, shoulders, hips and thighs, and most of all at his chewed-on neck. In the fleshy part of his groin, an immaculate red impression of teeth was ringed around the base of his penis. His wrist was twisted and broken.

Did he look like that? Could he look like that and be alive?

He didn't contemplate the sight of his body long, for suddenly beneath the layers of veils in front of him was Jaina, approaching ghost-like towards him, floating like a dream or a vision, and he looked at her from his own eyes, back in his own body. She lifted the rippling wisps of fabric one by one with a pale hand, slowly parting the transparent barriers between them, and he saw her long fingernails were dark. She was dressed in a white gown, her skin almost as pale as the silk. The flesh of her face and half-exposed breasts were strewn with crystals of ice that glittered like jewels as they emerged from her flesh. Her golden hair too had turned bone white, and snowflakes adorned her like earrings. A crown that might have been ice or might have been glass rested over her forehead, and her eyes were not as pale blue as the other Scourge. Even had there been anything but fluttering curtains in the vast darkness to look at... he could not take his eyes off her.

The creature leaned over him. "Anduin," she said sweetly, his name slow and musical from her lips.

 _Frost queen_ , he thought.

"Jaina, help me," he said, but the frost queen laughed, a delicate tinkling sound, a thousand small icicles falling into a pile.

The being that had been Lady Jaina Proudmoore turned and drifted away like she was a banshee, as though her feet no longer touched the ground. "Jaina!" he cried.

He tried to rise to his feet, to chase after her, but found he could only manage to get to his knees, balancing unsteadily on the fabric under him. He blundered and tipped over as he crawled into more hanging veils, some of them stretched taut, impeding him as surely as if they were descending purely to thwart him. Jaina had long since vanished.

Then with a brush of fabric against his cheek he realized he was blindfolded. His clumsy fingers ripped at the black fabric over his eyes and as if in a dream the veils fell away...

...and he was back in the room with the bed-couch and he was weak and thirsty but not in pain, and there were hands all over him, caressing hands, on his chest and his stomach, his hard cock and his ass. There were only the three elves in the chamber with him, looking down at him with their glowing yellow death-eyes, yet it felt like there were many more hands on him, more than six, a dozen hands on him at least, maybe half again that many. He didn't recall an orgasm, but from the pleasure behind his sex and radiating up and down he knew he'd just come recently. Yet the smell of blood filled the air and for some reason the scent filled him with feelings he couldn't name. He ached to come again, and the skillfully tugging hands on his cock, the fingers stroking his balls and behind his balls, the teasing fingertips in his tender ass had him so close to the edge...

Anduin writhed in the bed until his muscles all tightened and he climaxed again, gasping as he came and spurted over his chest and stomach, and he lay panting and looking up at them and awaited whatever was coming next.


End file.
